The present subject matter relates generally to a system and method for recording, documenting and visualizing group conversations.
Educators, organizations and governing bodies all understand the power of group discussion when it comes to learning, gaining perspective, and decision-making. However, the opinions and ideas advanced in group discussions may become distorted when certain viewpoints take over or dominate a conversation. Discussion moderators should, therefore, strive to include all voices, but sometimes it is difficult to identify patterns of dominance or situations where members of the group are not speaking up.
By recording conversations, moderators and participants may attempt to identify the more vocal and marginalized parties, but the task of sorting through an audio or even video recording would be daunting. An audio recording would require full playback in order to identify all the speakers. Users could potentially fast-forward a video recording, but identifying the speaker would be difficult depending on how the camera was positioned. Further, both recording methods lack an automated method for compiling statistics and viewing data about the levels of participation.
Further, more often than not, people are only interested in an overview of the discussion or just the interesting parts. Enabling efficient access to captured discussion recordings is essential in order to benefit from this content. Searching and browsing audiovisual information can be a time consuming task.
The ability to play back the discussion at multiple speeds, identifying speakers, organizing the audio or video recording, and analyzing data regarding the speakers' participation would be particularly useful in classroom settings, business settings, and social settings. Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for recording group conversations, identifying speakers, playing back the conversation with clear visualization of the conversation's progress, and analyzing data about the conversation, as described herein.